A Psychiatrist Looks at the Law
JR, HENRY ROOT STERN
A Psychiatrist Looks at the Law The Psychology of the Criminal Act and Punishment. By Gregory Zilboorg. Harcourt, Brace. 141 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Henry Root Stern Jr. Member of New York and...
...Consequently, the law requires psychiatry to fit medical fact to legalistic definition, producing widespread confusion among judges, juries and lawyers...
...Do they mean to connote something like a modality in the philosophical Leibnizian sense...
...Zilboorg makes an eloquent plea for a change in the system of taking expert testimony, decrying the current practice of placing the expert in an adversary position...
...As Dr...
...For the judge and practicing attorney, especially the advocate at the criminal bar, this book compels a serious re-examination of the traditional legal bases of crime and punishment...
...Member of New York and Federal Bars...
...Whether or not punishment deters crime has long been a grave question...
...What are we to assume is the self-understood meaning of the words 'the quality of the act...
...The effect of the rule has been to graft onto moralistic (rather than scientific) principle a non-medical definition of a medical condition...
...Let us turn to the term quality...
...Zilboorg renders an important service in laying at rest the deterrent theory...
...As the author states: "'the nature and quality of the act' has no meaning whatsoever unless we bring it into harmony with the total personality of the criminal, even and particularly if it is the insane harmony of a pathological mind...
...Certainly not the metaphysical, transcendental meaning of the act...
...Also of interest to the student of jurisprudence is the chapter entitled "The Deterrent Effect of Punishment...
...The book also contains valuable chapters on differences in professional psychology and on the sources of the drive to punish, offering sound comments on the use of psychiatric testimony in the courts...
...Zilboorg has made an important contribution to both medical history and medico-legal jurisprudence...
...He has examined some historical aspects of the problem reflected in the title and has also begun its restatement in terms of a psychiatrist's deep understanding of human aggression...
...This declared that no person was relieved of criminal responsibility unless, at the time the act was committed, he was suffering from such a defect of reason as not to know either the nature and quality of the act or that it was wrong...
...The average man, even if he be a wilful murderer, is not expected to be a well-versed epistemologist...
...The philosophical implications of this rule have been debated, misapplied and misunderstood since its enunciation...
...We must assume that by 'the quality of the act' is meant the inhuman, anti-human immorality of the act...
...we must assume that by 'nature of the act' we mean the cruelty, the enormity, the immorality of it...
...Zilboorg trenchantly points out: "What is the specific, tangible meaning of the nature of the act...
...If our assumption as to the moral connotation of these words is wrong, then these words have no meaning whatsoever, not any longer at any rate, if ever they had one...
...These matters demand the close attention of the medical and legal professions, as well as of the bench...
...former Assistant District Attorney, Nassau County In this penetrating book, based on the author's Isaac Ray Award Lectures at Yale University, Dr...
...The opening chapter, entitled "The Nature and Quality of the Act," contains a reasoned attack upon the famous rule in M'Naghten's Case...
...The average man, even if he be a wilful murderer, is not expected to be a well-versed metaphysician...
Vol. 37 • August 1954 • No. 34
